Late to the party!

I finally read one of the best selling and most iconic books in American history, albeit it was published in 1880, but what is a hundred years between friends?  I saw a really bad Canadian movie of 'Ben-Hur' last year and recently we listened to the Focus on the Family audio drama, but I had never read the book, along with all the other snippets and cultural references that were still present in my own girlhood: an episode call 'Ben-Hog' in the animated Garfield series of the late 1980s, Anne of Green Gables getting in trouble for reading it during geometry...  I think I have even seen the classic movie, but I have never read the book!

Overall I found it an excellent read, the author's attention to detail is exquisite and is the next best thing to a trip to the Holy Land.  It kept me interested, characters, plot, language, pacing, even though I vaguely knew the plot, were all very well done.  The only thing that really annoyed me was the author's insistence on placing Christ's birth on December 25th and making Jesus and His mother's physical appearance identical to all those romanticized, Caucasian Jesus pictures, where He looks like a well groomed hippy!  For a guy who did so much research and paid such attention to every other detail, it was a little irksome, if he hadn't bothered with such painstaking detail elsewhere, I would have let it pass, but it is obvious he's only trying to avoid angering his readers by enlightening them to the real facts of the matter that Jesus most likely did not have blue eyes and that we don't really know the exact day of His birth, though it is likely around lambing time.

Jesus wasn't physically pretty, Isaiah tells us that, 'He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him,' in the 53rd Chapter predicting the Messiah and His suffering for humanity's sin.  So boy band Jesus is a figment of our imaginings.  I understand why he wrote that way, but it clashes with the rest of the novel, which is otherwise so precise in every minute detail, which is ironic as a major theme of the book is people realizing that the Messiah did not come as a physical King or a military conqueror to overthrow the Romans, but rather to save the souls of men.  While the author wanted to open the eyes of his characters to the true nature of the Son of God, he was willing to allow his readers to persist in their cultural naiveté as to the birth date and physical appearance of their Savior, not that those are major issues, but it is amusingly ironic!

I also find it interesting the vast differences in the movies and audio dramas and other spin offs from the original.  Many of them miss the entire point of the book, and it is not the chariot race.  Just for that you should read the book, and even if you've seen all the movies, etc., you might be rather surprised by the plot!  Overall, it is a very good read, especially if you are curious about the subtitle, which most of the spin-offs seem to forget, 'A tale of the Christ.'  Enjoy!

The Great Bread Machine Revival?

People, we are seeing a movement like we haven't since the nineties!  It is full on revival!  It's another Great Awakening and no, I'm not talking 1890s...bread machines are back in demand!  That wasn't what you thought I was talking about, was it (though maybe the title gave it away).  Is this news, probably not, I'm only aware of it because my bread machine decided to have mental issues yesterday and my husband's answer was to go price shopping online, only to discover the things are sold out everywhere.  Happily my own unit came out of its stupor and seems to be working again, but I was still intrigued by the temporary shortage of something so obscure as a bread machine.

When all this started I noted that bread was completely sold out in our store for a week or two, but as I haven't bought bread in over a decade, it wasn't more than an idle curiosity, though I also noted that the flour was all gone and so was the yeast.  Apparently people were going to try making their own and this bread machine shortage shows how widespread that idea is.  I find it wonderful that this pandemic has produced such unexpected and wholesome fruits.  A couple months ago, bread making was a lost art, only practiced by foodies with an interest in that sort of thing or by necessity for those with dietary issues, but most people in general, had no clue about the process.  Necessity has forced us to look back to the wisdom of the past, to wonder how our forebears survived in a world without Google and Wonder Bread.  And what will be the result?  Has a whole new generation of bread makers come of age?  Long after this crisis passes, will they still have their sleeves rolled up and covered in flour, recapturing the joy of turning water and flour into a true culinary miracle?

What other 'ancient wisdom,' will we rediscover out of doubt, fear, necessity, or boredom?  What about the answers to the great questions of life?  Why are we here?  Where did we come from and where are we going?  Why is there evil, pain, and suffering in the world?  Perhaps it is time to rediscover the faith with answers to those tough questions, have you discovered the Bread of Life?  Even if you can't get your hands on a bread machine, the 'Bread that comes down from Heaven' is available anytime, anywhere, to everyone!

This is your life?

I keep reading L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle and thinking it is my own autobiography, save a few minor details.  Have you ever found a book like that?  One you read and wondered how it was your own life had been captured by a stranger, especially one who wrote a hundred years ago?  That's the power of story, my friend, no matter in what genre you are dabbling: film, books, video games, comics, music and art...all of it should tell a story, at least any of it worth bothering about!  Story is the language of the soul, no matter the medium!  Wondering what to do during these strange weeks at home or how to help others or change the world for the better?  Why not engage with story?  Read to your children, watch a good movie with your spouse, write that novel you've been incubating, take a virtual tour of an art museum or listen to the Requiem or the Messiah in their entirety or break out your own forgotten paints and add some color to the world!

Take this time to add beauty and meaning and wonder to the world, put something beautiful in!  Modern forms of art, music, literature, and poetry revel in destroying all the rules, all the meaning, the entire point of any of it.  Art and story must have meaning or they are meaningless, just like our lives!  So if you find yourself in a lonely, colorless existence at the moment, all this enforced time at home has revealed the utter bankruptcy of your soul, you aren't alone nor are you hopeless!  Begin today, add color and meaning and purpose to your drab little life!  Read great books and good poetry, watch wonderful movies, have real conversations about deep things, study great art and music, develop your own latent skills in whatever discipline and add to the vast human repertoire.

But remember it is all still meaningless if there is no Meaning behind everything.  If we are the result of some cosmic sneeze, with no eternal destiny or meaning, then go ahead and watch and listen to drivel as meaningless as our reality, until the coldness and loneliness and pointlessness freezes your heart and mind as cold as the regions between the stars, for that is our ultimate destiny: cold, dark oblivion, if Nothing is Everything.  Otherwise, take that thirst for Something and look under the metaphorical rocks and logs of reality until you find it, sell all that you have for this Pearl of Great Price, this Treasure buried in a Field.  That very thirst is a sign you are alive, that life has meaning, and that the point of life is to find that Meaning.  A mere chemical abstraction shouldn't feel empty, lonely, pointless, but a living, breathing, quivering, wondering soul certainly can!  Enjoy story in all its variations and remember the Great Author to whom they point!

Lest ye die?

I'm totally puzzled about the strange insanity that has gripped the country.  People are actually driving 3 hours to our itty bitty hole in the wall town to buy toilet paper as all the urban centers are sold out, but this is a respiratory virus, why do you need scads of toilet paper?  True, dogs and calves get diarrhea from a corona virus, but as far as I know each is species specific and of no relation to the current human strain.  Why aren't we then worried about weird cancer like growths then as happens to the unfortunate feline sufferer?  Anyway, life in general is canceled until further notice for something that is far from having the ramifications of a war or the plague.  Should we use common sense and take reasonable precautions, yes!  Should we destroy the economy and all social intercourse, no!  But why are people going bananas?  I just don't get it.

Then I ran across this beautiful article.  Wow!  Now I get it.  Nobody wants to die.  Nobody wants to stare death in the face.  Everybody wants to have control of their entire destiny from birth through death.  We want to choose, we want to do it our way.  And we want to be so distracted from the concept that any interruption thereto is cause for crisis.  And since we need to stare mortality in the face at the moment, let's have a panic to distract therefrom!  Lent has gone viral (sorry, bad pun).  So wake up Church, reexamine your lives, stand up amidst this crisis and offer calm, truth, sense, and hope for a world gone mad!  The world needs Hope, not toilet paper, and we're the only people who know how to find it.  So when death finally does stare you in the face, even if it isn't for many years to come, you can grin back because his is a losing hand!

The Jane Austen Prequels?

The miniseries Sanditon (Jane Austen's unfinished novel) seems like to meet the fate of the source material, as it finished on a rather non-Austen cliff hanger with little hope of a second season to smooth out the wrinkles, unless of course they are going for a 'Becoming Jane' feel and ending on such a wretched note because that's how real life turned out, but this is fiction and Jane Austen too, I hope someone reconsiders lest they never live down the irony!  But if you are tired of modern remakes and interpretations and disasters pertaining to all things Austen, why not indulge in Fanny Burney?  Yeah, I never heard of her either, but I saw a little article about her writings and thought I'd give her a try, apparent influence on Austen as she was.  It was a little eerie, reading Cecilia, I felt like I saw the ghost of a hundred different characters or plots of Austen fame all through the book.

Overall it was wonderfully written, but it was insanely long and tedious at times and I even wonder if the young Austen was poking fun at Burney with her quote, 'run mad as often as you like but do not faint' for some of the antics of the characters?  If you have exhausted all things Austen, and are a diehard fan, give Burney a try, but if you are a casual acquaintance, go watch the five hour mini-series of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth!  In Austen you find all of Burney's exquisite satirical wit and social commentary, but refined, sharpened, precise, finished, dare I say perfected?  The pupil has out shown the master!  There are several characters that could be left out entirely but are given pages and pages of conversation that is neither advancing the plot or amusing, rather it is tedious, not to mention you want to slap the main characters at various moments as well.  The romance minds one of either Persuasion or Mansfield Park or Jane Eyre with the long, painful, impossible, never-ending twists and turns but without characters half so interesting to walk that interminable road with.

Check out project Gutenberg for free copies of Burney's novels, they are certainly worth a try for the hardcore Austen enthusiast, but for anyone else, they might be the death of their interest in classic literature, perhaps death by classic literature?

Making the Myth Real

Here's an interesting little article, anything that quotes C.S. Lewis must be worth the read, right?  Then I realized that's why I write stories, well besides for the fact that I'm apparently wired to do nothing but.  I am fascinated with the idea of why stories haunt us, why was that the mechanism through which the Word made flesh decided to communicate to humanity?  Even in this age of disparate interests, Story is still at the heart of our entertainment, purpose, recreation, and culture.  Nobody would care about climate change if it was a mere conglomeration of statistics and measurements, rather we clothe it in epic splendor and proclaim it like the Prophets of old did the coming Messiah and suddenly it is as widespread and accepted as the Gospel in our grandparents' day.  There's a reason He speaks in parables!  The only question is, will we come to embrace the old, old story as more than an intriguing tale of ancient days?  There is a reason we were brought to Narnia, but will we be Susan or Lucy, very participants in the fairy tale of life but either blind to its reality or eager to see what lies beyond it?

Thesis anyone?

Anyone need a thesis in psychology or literature?  How about 'Narcissistic Personality Disorder in Classic Literature?'  There's much worse out there, let me assure you, my favorite being 'Oedipal Complex in Good Night Moon,' yeah, I don't get it either!  In my last post, I mused upon why so many famous and beloved authoresses seem to be so familiar with the idea, namely Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and L.M. Montgomery.  What is it about narcissists that inspires great writing?  Is it that they make such lovely villains?  That's certainly necessary for a good story, but what makes a good writer?  Basically it is someone who can so describe in words, landscapes, people, situations, and other complex realities that we can see them in our mind's eye, feel them in our hearts, acknowledge them with our mind, all without ever actually seeing them, but feeling that we have known them in person.

I propose there is a four fold reason for this phenomenon in those significantly influenced by a narcissist.  This is not to say that every great writer was raised by a narcissist or all children of narcissists will be great writers!  Rather it seems far too curious a coincidence to be mere happenstance, thus I may theorize at will, but I leave it to the biographers and historians to say who the narcissist might have been in each of these women's lives.  First, a soul must express itself for we are creative beings, and when all other arts are forbidden, the imagination is sometimes our sole escape, creating elaborate worlds, stories, and characters to people our bleak and colorless lives to such an extent that our inner world is far more lovely and intricate than our real surroundings and relationships.

Second, when you live daily with such a person, who questions every blink, breath, movement, thought, look, sneeze and so forth, when you can hardly breath without criticism or permission, you become a keen observer of human behavior, learning painfully how to minimize the offense given for such grievous sins as hiccups and laughter or tears, you learn to read the least signs of others' moods and dispositions, lest you fall afoul of an already precarious situation by some inadvertent blunder that might have been prevented had you been paying attention to the other's mood.  This familiarity with humanity in general and in particular would be very useful for a budding writer in developing characters and cultures.

Third, when you have no solace in human company or relationships, solitude and peaceful surroundings are then your only solace (at least before social media!).  You escape outside (no matter the weather, it must be better than the subzero temperatures withindoors) and wander far and wide, learning to see beauty and hope everywhere, developing a love of nature and all her moods and aspects or perhaps histories or museums or fairy tales or a hundred other escapes fill that aching void in your heart that should be filled by human love and kindness.  As you learn the many facets of human behavior and mood, so too do you fill your mind with the intricacies of your given retreat, be it a forest or a drawing room, which in turn might allow you to recreate the phenomenon in words for others' perusal.

Lastly, writing is an escape, an outlet for otherwise pent up feelings, emotions, and experiences.  When you are not allowed either to laugh or cry, sometimes your only outlet is words, words, words.  Sometimes we write to understand ourselves or the world about us, sometimes to save ourselves from madness or exploding with the pressure.  Our fantasy worlds become more real and beautiful than our daily lives, into it we pour all our stifled passions and heady visions, so drab on the outside, but alive and bubbling as a fountain within and as easily staunched.  If you do write the thesis on this, remember to cite this article!  Enjoy!